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New wheat breeding paradigms for a warming climate

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Abstract

Plant breeding has been successful in adapting crops worldwide with one of the latest challenges being adaption to warmer days and nights. Taking wheat as a case study, here we show current elite nurseries express a range of levels of heat adaptation. Generally, the higher the selection ratio for yield response under warming, the less stable the yield response across environments. Specifically, less than one-third of genotypes trialled adapted well to the 0.26 °C warming of the last decade, and the phenotypes were stable in only 26% of environments. With continued warming, selection ratio falls 8.5% and stability falls 8.7% for each 1 °C increase in local temperature. Overall, faced with more climate variability, breeders need to revisit their breeding strategies to integrate genetic diversity that confers climate resilience without penalties to productivity in favourable seasons.

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Fig. 1: Changes in climate variables across trials under global warming.
Fig. 2: Diverse yield response of genotypes across environments under future warming.
Fig. 3: Wide adaptation and selection efficiency of genotypes at different warming levels at each nursery.
Fig. 4: Changes in WAI and SEI due to current and future warming.

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Data availability

The original IWIN nursery data are publicly available at https://data.cimmyt.org. The climate data for historical period (1980–2021) are from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (https://www.ecmwf.int)—AgERA5 gridded weather dataset. The projected climate data for 2015–2100 generated by five Global Climate Models are from the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (https://www.isimip.org). The cleaned nursery data and corresponding climate and environmental variables prepared for this study are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/3GAKGY (ref. 53).

Code availability

Data analysis scripts, including random forest (RF) yield and G × E forecasting and plotting, were developed with Python v3.11.4 and deposited in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/3GAKGY (ref. 53). Requests for scripts for the analyses performed can be directed to W.X.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the project granted by the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR). This study was also supported by the CGIAR research programme on wheat agri-food systems (CRP WHEAT) and the CGIAR Platform for Big Data in Agriculture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIMMYT-China (Henan) Wheat and Maize Joint Research Center/College of Agronome, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China

    Wei Xiong, Daowen Wang & Feng Chen

  2. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Texcoco, Mexico

    Wei Xiong, Matthew P. Reynolds, Carlo Montes, Jose Crossa, Sieglinde Snapp, Huihui Li & Zhonghu He

  3. International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), Izmir, Turkey

    Beyhan Akin

  4. International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA), Ankara, Turkey

    Keser Mesut

  5. Bahri Dagdas International Agricultural Research Institute, Konya, Turkey

    Fatih Ozdemir

  6. Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China

    Huihui Li & Zhonghu He

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  1. Wei Xiong
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Contributions

W.X. and M.P.R. conceived the study. C.M., B.A., K.M., F.O. and Z.H. collected and processed the data. W.X. and J.C. analysed the data. W.X. and M.P.R. wrote the paper, and all contributed to the writing.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wei Xiong or Matthew P. Reynolds.

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Nature Climate Change thanks Nimai Senapati, Rod Snowdon and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Illustration of the relationship between WA and SE and computing WAI and SEI.

Blue points indicate all possible pairs of WA and SE for the nursery, with boxplot at the top and right showing the value distribution of WA and SE, respectively. The vertical/horizontal lines in the box-and-whisker plots represent, from left/bottom to right/top, the minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and maximum of the WAI/SEI figures. Grey area under the blue points illustrates all varying combinations of WA and SE that breeders can expect. The green square shows the centroid point of the grey area, computed by weighted-averaging all possible WA and SE, with estimated WAI and SEI denoting the mean potential of the nursery for selecting warming-adapted cultivars.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Value distribution of SEI (a) and WAI (b) across nurseries.

Each box-and-whisker summarizes the value distribution of SEI (a) or WAI (b) for all temperature increase levels, namely 0.26 °C (warming in 2011–2020), 1 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C, 4 °C, 5 °C and 6 °C. The horizontal lines in the box represent, from bottom to top, the minimum, 25th percentile, median, 75th percentile and maximum of the SEI/WAI figures. The black dashed lines between the boxes are median value of SEI/WAI for elite breeding programs (left) and the stress breeding programs (right).

Extended Data Fig. 3 Selection efficiency (SE%) and wide adaptation (WA%) of genotypes for different warming levels under a breeding strategy assumed to maintain crop phenology for future climate conditions.

(a) ESWYT, (b) IDYN, (c) IWWYT-IRR, (d) HTWYT, (e) SAWYT, (f) IWWYT_SA.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Selection efficiency (SE%) and wide adaptation (WA%) of genotypes for different warming levels under a breeding strategy assumed to yield radiation efficiency under higher CO2 concentrations.

(a) ESWYT, (b) IDYN, (c) IWWYT-IRR, (d) HTWYT, (e) SAWYT, (f) IWWYT_SA.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Comparison of rate of change in wide adaptation index (WAI) and selection efficiency index (SEI) among different breeding strategies at each nursery.

(a) The present breeding approach, (b) a breeding strategy to maintain crop phenology under climate change, (c) a breeding strategy to increase radiation efficiency under higher CO2 concentration, and (d) the present breeding approach as (a), but the computation follows steps described in the method except yearly yield is estimated from climate variables fitting by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression (see Methods). The height of bar represents the estimated rate of change of SEI and WAI, estimated from the estimated figure of SEI and WAI for the seven warming levels (colored points). The error bars show the 95% confidence interval of the estimated changing rate, and bar width indicating the relative value of SEI and WAI for the current warming level of 2011–2020 (0.26 °C).

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Xiong, W., Reynolds, M.P., Montes, C. et al. New wheat breeding paradigms for a warming climate. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 869–875 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02069-0

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